Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel update messed up console encoding

[Florian v. Savigny]

Hi Sebastian,

  > > But Emacs displays the lower-case umlauts followed by a space
  > > etc. etc. ...

  > what does file say about the offending files?

I was not actually talking about files when I mentioned Emacs, but
what I see when I *type* into Emacs (such as in this mail
message). But in case you mean what that produces when I save the
result of what I typed into a file, I ran a few tests, and the results
were mixed:

For the 3 lower-case umlauts, file reports UTF-8, consistent with the
number of bytes (i.e. the file length): 3 characters, 6 bytes. The hex
representation of the 6 bytes is: c3 a4 c3 b6 c3 3c.

For the three upper-case umlauts and for the eszett, file reports
iso-8859, also consistent with the number of bytes: 3 characters, 3
bytes. The code position is, however, definitely wrong: it is always
hex c3 (which would be the upper-case A tilde in iso-8859-1, and four
different letters can hardly have the same code position.)

To me this looks as if Emacs puts the first half of the byte sequences
(always the hex c3) into the buffer, while trying to interpret the
other half (see list below) as a command: it will say something like
"\204 is undefined". I am quite certain \nnn is an octal number.

eszett: \237 (hex 9f, dec 159)
A uml: \204 (hex 84, dec 132)
O uml: \226 (hex 96, dec 150)
Uuml: \234 (hex 9c, dec 156)

If I am right, the keys thus send:

eszett: c3 9f
A uml: c3 84
O uml: c3 96
U uml: c3 9c
a uml: c3 a4
o uml: c3 b6
u uml: c3 3c

I would assume that these sequences are the UTF-8 representation of
the respective characters (but I don't have a table to figure that
out).

Sorry if the whole thing was diffcult to follow. I should perhaps have
mentioned that for the upper-case umlauts and the eszett, Emacs not
only complains, but also inputs an "unknown" character into the
buffer, represented by a '?' in reverse video. That's apparently the
hex c3 byte.

  > Emacs always uses the enconding of the file, where as an redirect
  > uses the locale, iirc.

I know; normally it can figure it out - I think this ability is not
compromised in any way (I can e.g. open an XML file encoded in utf-8,
and will see "11u" in the mode line). Also, please note that under X,
Emacs behaves completely as before.

By "redirect", you mean shell redirection?  Does that do any character
conversion?

  > I assume you know the options->mule menu in emacs, there is a lot to
  > help with encoding issues...

Yes, I know, but I don't see how set-input-method would fix this. Do you?

  > > As to the locale, where can I look that up ... ?
  > .bashrc

Neither ~/.bashrc nor /etc/bash/bashrc contain any locale setting
... hmm.

But very frankly, would the solution not focus on the kernel, at least
partly? As I said, I can reverse the phenomenon by simply booting the
old kernel!

Does nobody know where the kernel controls what the keys of the
console keyboard send when pressed?

(BTW, KEYMAP="de-latin1-nodeadkeys", in /etc/conf.d/keymaps.)

Regards, Florian